New York’s Necessary New AIDS Memorial

The New York City AIDS Memorial sits above underground tunnels, now filled in, through which bodies were transported out of St. Vincent’s Hospital during the AIDS crisis.

PHOTOGRAPH BY MAX FLATOW / NEW YORK CITY AIDS MEMORIAL

At the intersection of Twelfth Street and Greenwich Avenue, in the West Village, lies a small parcel of land shaped like a pizza slice, with Seventh Avenue as the crust. The Loew’s Sheridan movie theatre opened there in the twenties, anointing the slice as a center of culture in a neighborhood teeming with it. Edward Hopper, a cinephile and a Village local, made a painting of the Sheridan’s glamorous interior in the thirties; Billie Holiday sang there in 1957, two years before she died, selling out its twenty-three hundred seats. In 1969, St. Vincent’s Hospital, whose main building sat across Seventh Avenue, bought the land and demolished the Sheridan. A community garden briefly took its place before the hospital erected its Materials Handling Center, an unlovely squat brown brick structure to house its loading dock, in the nineteen-eighties. By then, St. Vincent’s had become ground zero for New York’s AIDS crisis, with an AIDS ward second in size only to San Francisco General’s. Medical supplies were transported into the hospital through tunnels that ran underneath the Handling Center. Corpses were transported out the same way.

St. Vincent’s closed in 2010, and has since been replaced, after much local protest and many heated town-hall discussions, by an apartment building of luxury condos and a row of townhouses developed by the Rudin Management Company. One good thing to come of the substitution of a hospital serving the whole downtown community with homogenous housing for the wealthy is St. Vincent’s Triangle Park, as the pizza slice on Twelfth Street is now known, a freshly landscaped fifteen-thousand-square-foot public space of benches, walkways, lawn, and water jets, which is also home to the nearly completed New York City AIDS Memorial. Much of the memorial is still fenced off behind blue tarp, but it was briefly unveiled for a dedication ceremony on December 1st, World AIDS Day, revealing an ethereal, kite-like canopy of silvery slatted-steel triangles anchored to the ground by triangular legs stood on point.

A triangular monument in Triangle Park on a triangular plot of land is more than a pleasing coincidence of geometry. In Nazi concentration camps, gay prisoners were made to identify themselves by wearing a pink triangle. The famous “Silence = Death” poster, designed in 1986 to demand that attention be paid and action taken against AIDS, claimed that shape and inverted it, drawing a parallel between the two catastrophes while positing the triangle as a symbol of pride and defiance. The memorial’s delicate design, by the Brooklyn firm Studio ai, is reminiscent of a feather, or of a snowflake splintered into its component tetrahedrons, or of a translucent origami crane. There is something almost animate about it, as if it might unpinion itself at any moment and take flight. When I went to see the canopy, on a quick-falling December evening, it seemed to invite the souls that had once travelled through the now-filled-in tunnels below to ascend through its sieve-like portals on their journey away from Earth.

Across the street, lights were coming on at the Greenwich Lane, the Rudin building on the former St. Vincent’s site. Real estate plays an outsize role in most New York stories. In the story of AIDS, it has become crucial to understanding both the way that the city handled, or mishandled, the crisis in its early days and the way that the crisis forever marked the city in return.

In his new book, “How to Survive a Plague,” a riveting, galvanizing account of the response to the epidemic in New York, David France describes arriving in Manhattan as a young man in June, 1981, with his college roommate, the two of them “sleeping chastely on opposite edges of a narrow, lumpy bed” in their one-room midtown apartment. Stonewall had beckoned young L.G.B.T. people to the city at the end of the sixties; cheap rent during the grungy, bankrupt seventies had allowed them to stay. “We were part of the largest influx of gay men and lesbians in New York’s history, a vast gay reverse-diaspora,” France writes. “Born into exile and separated from our own kind, we were reassembling in a place that had only existed in the imagination, the ‘new City of Friends’ conjured by Walt Whitman a hundred years before.”

That year, 1981, was when the AIDS epidemic was publicly acknowledged, though not by that name. The Times ran its first story on the “Rare Cancer Seen in 41 Homosexuals” two weeks after France arrived in Manhattan; doctors had already begun feverishly trying to find the connection between their gay patients’ host of strange and rare ailments. The disease started charting its course through the city just as the bearish real-estate market, coaxed out of hibernation by policies favorable to developers, turned relentlessly bullish. As people died, their same-sex partners, denied the sorts of survivor benefits to which a spouse would be entitled, were evicted from the homes they had shared; newly vacated blocks of affordable apartments were converted into high-end condos and market-rate rentals. Social pressure made quick work of those who had legal claim to stay. “Even if somebody was the surviving spouse of somebody who had AIDS, they were equally stigmatized and tainted, because they were probably also somebody who was living with AIDS,” the activist Eric Sawyer, who is on the board of the New York CityAIDS Memorial, told me recently over the phone. “People wanted you out of the building because you were a pariah.”

Sawyer grew up in a white working-class family near Binghamton, New York, and got involved in the gay-liberation movement after coming out during graduate school. In New York City, he made a living buying, renovating, and renting dilapidated and abandoned homes. He was early to recognize the problem that inadequate housing in the city posed for people with AIDS. He had begun experiencing symptoms in 1980, when he was in his late twenties; his boyfriend, Scott Bernard, died in 1986. “He was insistent upon not being hospitalized, because his own father had died of AIDS a year or two before he did,” Sawyer told me. Bernard’s father had been humiliated by the treatment that he received at the hospital near his home, in Illinois; the doctors and nurses there were afraid even to touch him. “And so, in the entire two years we had in which he died of AIDS, we cared for him at home,” Sawyer said, of Bernard.

Sawyer lived in Harlem, where he saw that the homeless population of people with AIDS was rapidly swelling. In March, 1987, he got in touch with his friend Larry Kramer to discuss the idea of developing special housing where people with H.I.V. and AIDS could live and receive care. Kramer was scheduled to give a speech at the Gay and Lesbian Community Center, on West Thirteenth Street, the following week; he told Sawyer that he was going to call for allies in the audience to support the formation of an organization dedicated to civil disobedience targeting the government’s tepid response to the crisis. “He said, ‘If you help me at the civil-disobedience meeting, I’ll help you develop housing for people with AIDS,’ ” Sawyer recalled.

The advocacy organization ACT UP was born at the March meeting. Shortly afterward, Sawyer, along with the architect Rich Jackman, created ACT UP’s Housing Committee, the seed of what, a few years later, would become Housing Works. The committee’s initial goal was to compel the city government to help develop housing that would be suitable and safe for people with H.I.V. and AIDS. Homelessness, a nationwide scourge during the Reagan years, had become an increasingly urgent problem in New York, with its dangerous and overcrowded shelter system. Shelter residents with H.I.V. and AIDS were especially vulnerable, the targets of aggression both from other residents and from staff. Many took their chances on the street.

Sawyer and the Housing Committee began attending auctions of city-owned or abandoned properties. They quickly learned that the sort of tax incentives they sought were mostly given to luxury developers. “We couldn’t even get the city to engage in any kind of discussion,” Sawyer told me. “And so we organized a few demonstrations to try to change that.”

The first big Housing Committee demonstration took place on Black Friday of 1988. It targeted the symbolic face of nineteen-eighties, greed-is-good New York real estate: Donald Trump. “We basically invaded Trump Tower, because we were enraged that here there was this developer who had developed the Grand Hyatt hotel, and also Trump Tower, who was getting city funding, city welfare, so to speak, to enrich himself,” Sawyer told me. (Trump, with his characteristic contempt for the truth, had manipulated the city into giving him a forty-year tax abatement to develop the Grand Hyatt in midtown—his first big project, and the first time in New York history that such an abatement was given to a commercial developer.) Some protesters threw fake bills marked as “blood money” into the air; others handed out paper plates—empty—for “Trumpsgiving.” Police made arrests in the pink marble lobby. More ACT UP protests at Trump Tower followed the next year, including one in full costume on Halloween.

Soon after, Sawyer told me, he began driving his pickup truck around the city on garbage-collection nights, taking home large items, such as couches, refrigerators, and TVs, to store in his basement. When they had gathered enough materials, Sawyer and fellow-members of the Housing Committee packed up the furniture and drove it down to the city’s Housing Preservation and Development department, on Gold Street, where they used it to block off the intersection, putting the furniture in the middle of the street and chaining themselves to it. “That made the local news, at five-thirty and six o’clock, and even continued into the evening news at six-thirty. And so it was a major source of embarrassment, got lots of coverage in the Times and the local papers,” Sawyer told me. The canny publicity strategy paid off. A few weeks later, New York City dedicated twenty-five million dollars to housing for people with AIDS; the state matched the amount. As so many ACT UP actions showed, and as we have seen again this week at Standing Rock, sustained, collaborative protest works—though only if the people targeted by such protests are endowed with the capacity to feel shame.

The risk of a memorial is that it seems to certify the past as past, signed and sealed. The effect of the plague years has never stopped reverberating throughout the city. In her 2012 book “Gentrification of the Mind,” the writer Sarah Schulman cites a report by the National Research Council on the social impact that AIDS had in Manhattan, noting that the borough’s neighborhoods with the highest rates of infection—Chelsea, the Lower East Side and East Village, Greenwich Village, and Harlem—are the same ones that experienced the most marked and rapid gentrification in the ensuing years. (Schulman is also one of the people behind the ACT UP Oral History Project, a vital memorial in its own right.) “The dynamics of death and replacement” is her term for this confluence of endemic death and New York’s real-estate boom. Whether consciously or not, we build our homes on the graves of others.

Memory is often passive, but it can be active, too, and there are promising early signs that the AIDS memorial will encourage the latter. Its tent-like shape, for one thing, complete with benches and fountain, seems primed for meetings of both the personal and the political varieties. And then there’s the grace note of Walt Whitman, whose “Song of Myself” has been inscribed on the granite paving stones under the steel canopy, in an installation by the artist Jenny Holzer. They begin in a circle, surrounding the memorial’s granite fountain like a mandala before pouring outward to taper to a point at the park’s tip. It is astounding to see the words of the great bard of New York’s streets carved on the street itself. You want to kiss the ground.

Names have always been a problem with memorializing AIDS; so many people have died of the disease either without knowing it themselves or without their deaths being properly marked. Whitman’s poem doesn’t make up for that absence, but here, in this setting, amid the hum and clatter of the city’s incessant life, his words give it new voice.

I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.

You will hardly know who I am or what I mean,But I shall be good health to you nevertheless,And filter and fibre your blood.

Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged,Missing me one place search another,I stop somewhere waiting for you.